The Road to Disillusionment

Coyne's first suspicion that the occupation wouldn't go as she hoped came on her first mission, which involved looking into the possible theft of archaeological finds. She came away worried by the confusion inside the U.S. military about the task and how to do it. "We just didn't understand what was going on, and we couldn't coordinate our own people," she remembered.

But she kept her hopes through the summer of 2003, until she transferred to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the civilian occupation office headed by L. Paul Bremer III. "It wasn't until the fall of 2003 that I really began thinking, 'This is a disaster -- we are never going to pull this together,' " she said. "It was amateur hour."

That unhappy thought occurred to her when she was looking into a successful street-cleaning program in Sadr City, where locals were being paid a few dollars a day to collect garbage and other refuse. As she made inquiries, it became clear that the people greatly appreciated the program, but that they were giving all the credit to radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters had infiltrated the management of the effort and were telling the workers that it was his program.

Her view of the U.S. effort became "bleaker and bleaker," she said.

For Coyne, the breaking point came in the spring of 2004, when news of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal emerged. "I assumed I was going to stay with the Army in Iraq for three or four years," she said. But after seeing the torture inflicted on Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at the prison on the western fringe of Baghdad, she said to herself, "I want to take off the uniform. I'll be in Iraq, but the Army is the wrong organization to do this."

At about the same time, Coyne was approached by the U.S. Institute of Peace -- an independent conflict resolution office sponsored by the federal government -- to run its Baghdad office and work on reducing sectarian violence through dialogue. She did that for the 18 months, leaving earlier this year as she felt her energy wane.

Coyne is still in the Army Reserve and wants to go on at least one more deployment. But she is pessimistic about the military's ability to handle nation-building missions such as the one it faces in Iraq. She likens it to a person who can't swim diving into the water to try to save a drowning man, but instead being able only to stand on the poor man's shoulders.

Even so, she said she thinks the U.S. military probably needs to stay in Iraq: "The troops are resented, but they also may be the last bulwark against a total meltdown."